How to Get Over Resentments

Resentments can poison a relationship slowly over time. For that reason it is very important to remove past resentments and to stop the process that is creating new ones. Maybe it will come as no surprise that dealing with resentments is a common problem that I help with in couples therapy. Because I do deal with this issue often, I’ve come up with some quick ways of getting to the root of this challenging problem. Here is one.

What is resentment?

Before I share the tool for handling resentments, I want to make sure that you are interpreting the word resentment the same way that I am. For me, resentments are different from grudges or holding onto past pains. For example, if you are still holding it against your partner for an affair, that may not be a resentment. It could be mistrust, self-protection, or just pain and hurt. To be sure, these can also challenge a relationship and I have tools for dealing with them. But to me “resentment” refers to a bitter response when you feel someone has treated you in a way you feel they shouldn’t. The bitterness is the key to destructive power of resentment in a relationship.

What I’ve learned in my practice is that when a member of a couple is experiencing resentment instead of anger or another protective impulse, it is because they feel violated by their partner but they don’t know how to stop the violation or to protect themselves from it in the future. In other words:

Resentment is the feeling when someone is or has violated your boundaries but when you aren’t defending those boundaries.

How does therapy resolve resentments?

The most common way that resentment becomes a focus of couples therapy sessions is when one member of a couple, often with a voice dripping with spite, accuses their partner of hurting them in the way they are resentful for. The accusation is usually an invitation for me to jump in and begin working with the offending partner. But I turn my attention instead to the person with the resentment.

Over the next few minutes, I ask a series of questions designed to help me understand the emotional needs and the ability of the resentful partner to get their needs met or to set boundaries about things that don’t meet their needs.

• How do you want to be treated?
• What is it about this behavior that doesn’t work for you?
• How do you share with your partner that this behavior doesn’t work for you? What happens next?
• If your partner repeats the violation how do you ensure that you are safe from this boundary violation?
• If you aren’t safe and if your partner keeps violating your boundary this way, why are you still with this partner?
• Why do you want to be with a partner who treats your boundaries with such disrespect?

Together, with their partner listening, we begin to devise strategies for helping the resentful partner to defend their relationship boundaries. I might ask questions like, “Since your partner never gives you orgasms, would you like to stop having sex with them?” or “Since your partner never thanks you for cooking would you like to stop cooking?” or “Since your partner just schedules time with their friends without consulting with you, would you like to begin saying ‘No, I don’t want you to go out’ the next time this happens?”

Somewhere in the development of the strategy to hold the boundaries, there almost inevitably comes a decision point. Am I willing to risk a conflict in order to try to get my needs met or not? When clients answer this question, No. That’s fine with me but then I point them back at their resentment as I invite them to change their inner narrative from a negative one about how their partner takes advantage of them to a positive one about how they are choosing this course to strengthen their relationship and to keep it peaceful. When the resentful partner answers, Yes, I’m willing to risk conflict to get my needs met then I try to help them do that skillfully and compassionately.

Why is this couples therapy?

What I have described so far is an asymmetric line of questioning about the resentments with one partner. So you might wonder why this is a couples therapy intervention.

Somewhere in that line of questioning and in devising the solutions, the offending partner usually begins squirming. It can be uncomfortable to hear how you are hurting your partner. This might be the first time they’ve heard in detail how their behavior has hurt their partner. Sometimes, they don’t want to face the consequences for their behavior if their partner defends their boundaries from now on.

So, even though it appears that I’m focused on one person during this line of questioning, both people begin to feel pressure to change. Once they both identify what they want to do differently, they actually have to try out those changes. So, at the end of the session, I write down their intentions for change at the bottom of my note. As we begin checking in at the beginning of the next session I ask how their change efforts went.

I’m going to compare relationships (especially long ones) to owning and driving a car. Two years after I bought my car, it started exhibiting some eccentricities. Sometimes, when stopped, the RPMs will spike above 2000. To stop this, with one foot on the brake, I put the car into gear and gently let out the clutch until the gears engage just enough to temper the RPMs back down to under 1000. The air vent on the driver’s side isn’t adjustable. The door handle on the driver’s side stopped working, so I had to roll down the window and open it by reaching out to the handle on the outside. I had the door handle fixed, but then it broke the same way a month later. I didn’t fix it again. Now, after almost 13 years with this car, when I have a rental car, I instinctively reach to roll down the window before exiting. These eccentricities are mechanical, they are knowable, and they shape my experience of driving the car.

When I hear neuroscientists talk about brains, especially when they talk about how our brains mediate our experiences in relationships, I really try to figure out how to apply the knowledge to my practice. What does limbic activation tell me about solving arguments when both members of a couple are red-in-the-face angry?¹ What does the mesolimbic cortex tell us about sexual pleasure and desire?² What does the nucleus acumbens tell us about how we approach relationships in different contexts?³ And most of the time, I learn something about human relationships that has some value to my practice. The neuroscience of relationships tells me about how someone might be affected by their experience, and can help me to set scientifically informed (as opposed to traditional or moralistically founded) expectations about my clients, their change processes, and what is and is not likely to work for them in therapy. In other words, it is like me telling the person who changes the oil in my car that they have to roll down the window to get out of the driver’s seat. It is like me telling my mother about letting the clutch out at stop lights when she borrows the car. These are helpful because they define how to operate within the mechanical limits of the system, but they aren’t equivalent to learning how to drive any more than neuroscience teaches people how to be in a relationship. In fact, no amount of information about driving a car is equivalent to learning how to drive a car.

Knowing how your brain determines your experiences in relationships is like knowing how your car works to get you to your destination. By learning about the mechanics, you can get some good insights about what to do and not to do while driving your car, but learning those things doesn’t teach you how. Similarly, the procedural and process knowledge for being in relationships is learned through being in relationships.

However, there are some challenges to learning relationships through being in relationships. I like to sum these up as 1) No do-overs and 2) I’ve never been here before. Neuroscience can help teach us how to reduce the effects of these limitations as we navigate our relationships.

Relationships Don’t Have Do-Overs

We don’t get to practice life until we perfect the technique and then do it for real. Though I teach my couples the skill of asking for and giving a “do-over” this playful practice is not reality. The misspoken word, the years of overwork instead of being at home, or the emotional breakdown over a small issue once done, is now forever a part of the history of the relationship. That history doesn’t determine the future, but it can create pain and trauma that require healing in the present. So, unlike driving, we can’t practice relationships on a closed track. For better or worse, to learn to do relationships, we pull directly out onto the highway at our own peril and the peril of our partners. Neuroscience can teach us a lot about how we can drive skillfully, given our temperament, once we get onto that relationship highway, but it will never replace being in relationships.

Relationships Are New Every Day

Each person is limited by time as to the number and depth of relationships that it is possible to have in the span of one life. While many people enter into more than one long-term relationship in their life, there are only a limited number of those experiences that we have to draw on for figuring out how to navigate the current long-term relationship, which is unique. So, unlike driving, our ability to generalize from other experiences of driving the same relationship car (brain) and road (a specific relationship with one person) is severely limited. Instead, each moment in a relationship is the first and only time you get this chance.

Though we can generalize from prior experience to a degree, the way to be in a relationship today always includes new possibilities. You’ve never been with this partner this many days into a relationship. Even if this is your fourth decade-long, sequentially monogamous relationship in your life, you’ve never been in this relationship this long before. You’ve never been this old until today. And so, there is a limit to everything that you’ve learned. This is a wonderful gift. It means that today you or your partner could do something new, different, or unexpected. You are free today to begin creating the relationship that you have always wanted.

The neuroscience of plasticity, trauma recovery, and mood all bear on the capacity for the present to be different from the past and can help us learn how to break from old patterns more effectively.

Conclusion

I do not have antipathy toward the neuroscience of relationships. But the neuroscience of relationships has limits. Might a driver drive better knowing more about the mechanics of a car? Likely. But will it teach you to drive? No, to learn, you must drive. Similarly, the neuroscience of relationships might help you figure out what to try to improve your relationship, but to actually make it better, you have to change how you behave in your relationship. Is it possible to be skilled at your relationships without neuroscience knowledge? Yes, definitely. So don’t mistake one type of knowledge for the other. Don’t mistake a neuroscientist for a relationship expert. If you want to improve your relationship, reading a book is like reading a manual about driving. Don’t just read a book about relationships; get a certified relationship driving instructor and a licensed therapist.

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1 When the limbic system is activated, we aren’t thinking clearly; we just want to feel safe again, so we withdraw or lash out in whatever way we can to stop the threat. So when a couple is activated this way, I stop the discussion and help calm the clients down before we proceed with solutions.

² This system has several parts that help moderate expectation, pleasure, and desire. Knowing about this system helps me understand that helping couples increase sexual pleasure isn’t just about helping them find the right button to push. Instead, they need to learn that the button might be pleasurable, then find that it is pleasurable, and then have permission to want more of it.

³ This system helps us filter the context of our environment to determine whether we could feel sexual interest and desire in a given context. In long-term relationships, familiarity may not generate interest, while the stress of managing a life together may generate stressful associations with the partner instead of sexy ones. So, helping a couple increase novelty and decrease stress may be just as important as helping them communicate with one another.

 

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Empathy in Couples Therapy

One of the most common things that I teach in couples therapy is how to be empathic towards each other. Once I help a couple establish an empathic connection, most of the other challenges are relatively easy to solve because empathy makes solutions much easier to find and put into practice.

As a therapist in Silicon Valley, I work with a lot of high-drive, success-oriented people who have spent a lot of their lives developing a capacity for technical expertise. I end up helping many of my clients develop the softer skill of establishing an emotional connection through empathy. This post provides some reflections about my Empathy 101 Handout that I provide in couples therapy. The post will make the most sense if you print out the handout and follow along with it while you read the post. The handout also provides more examples of how to apply each skill.

Comprehension

There’s a secret step to empathy that isn’t on my handout, and you, blog reader, get the inside scoop. The first step in empathy is having someone with whom to empathize. Since I usually see people in couples therapy, this would seem like an easy step. But the person who needs empathy needs to be ready to receive it. If someone comes into my office and shares the names of their vulnerable emotions without expressing that emotion on their face, in their posture, or with their tone of voice, I become concerned that the person is not ready to receive empathy. Whatever the cause for the lack of readiness, when I see it I will pause the process and try to work with the person expressing emotions to try to make sure they aren’t just telling their emotions, but expressing them.

Once we have someone ready to receive empathy, the first step in empathy is developing Comprehension. That is, making sure that you and your partner know with which emotions you are empathizing. The Inquiry and Repeating Emotions sub-skills can help with this step. But from there, the person who is being empathized with will usually do one of three things: share more emotions, share an explanation about why the emotion exists, or repeat themselves. I’ve learned that a person who shares more emotions or who explains the emotions usually does so because they feel empathy with others. The additional emotions are a way of getting more empathy with more facets of the experience. The explanation is a way of helping the empathizing partner deepen the empathy by giving more information about the causes of the emotional experience. However, if the partner repeats themselves, this usually means that the person didn’t experience a feeling of empathy. Like other experiences of missed communication, when someone receiving empathy doesn’t really feel heard, they tend to repeat themselves.

Acknowledging reasons is another step in the process of empathy. It isn’t enough to understand that your partner is sad. If you don’t know why they are sad, and especially if you did something that triggered it but don’t understand what that is or why it is a trigger, then your empathy falls flat. This is because the reasons are a part of our internal emotional life. We only really feel understood when we know that people both understand the emotions inside of us, and the way that feeling developed.

Because this comprehension tool is a way of learning about the internal emotional experience of another person, it is a little bit like feeling your way around in a room with your eyes closed, but your spouse or partner has their eyes open. So, you say, “You feel sad when I didn’t come to your work event because coming to a work event is a sign of the closeness of our relationship. Is that right?” The question at the end indicates that you aren’t telling the other person what their emotions should be or that you think you know them better than they know themselves. The question indicates humility and an intention at once. With a question, you acknowledge that you don’t know everything about the person’s emotional experience. With the question, you demonstrate the intention to find out more about their emotional experience.

I have seen situations in couples therapy where the empathizing partner states the wrong emotion and the wrong reasons for it, but then ends with a question, the way I have described, and the conversation goes well. Empathy isn’t always about just getting the right answer; it is about demonstrating the intention to connect your emotional lives over time.

I have a final note on the empathy comprehension step. The skills listed above aren’t in any order. You can use them interchangeably as necessary until you and your lover feel that comprehension has been established.

Connection

If it is difficult to understand your lover’s emotions, it can be doubly difficult to do that at the same time as accessing your own vulnerable emotions. Yet, that is exactly what the next step, Connection, is all about. The steps in comprehension above can be done in any order, but the steps in the Connection step seem to work better in my therapeutic experience if offered in order.

Just as the comprehension skill includes questions that indicate intention, the connection skill also includes intention to connect with a slight difference. In this process, the intention is phrased a little more explicitly as in, “I want to be here with you so you aren’t alone in your sadness.” This more explicit statement of the intention leads well into some of the other aspects of the connection sub-skill.

Expressing tender feelings toward your partner requires finding your direct emotional reaction to your partner’s experience and not just to your reaction to the fact that their emotions happened. Let me explain the difference. Let’s say that you brought dinner home for your husband because he had covered for you while you stayed late at work, and you wanted to express appreciation, but instead of experiencing this gift the way you intended, he got hurt because he had been thinking that the two of you would get to bond while making dinner together. In this situation, a reaction might include a defense, “But I didn’t try to hurt you, I was doing something nice.” True. You are focusing on your emotional experience, though, and not empathizing. If you want to empathize, you have to consider the other person’s emotional experience, almost as if their emotional experience was caused by someone else. For example, “I’m really sad that I hurt you by bringing dinner home. I want you to feel close to me, not hurt. This acknowledgement of the chain of emotional events isn’t accepting fault; it is just acknowledging the truth of the other person’s emotional process. You may not have intended to hurt your husband by bringing dinner home, yet it happened. Now that it happened, despite your intentions otherwise, how do you feel about the existence of this pain in someone you love?

The final step in this connection process is asking what you could do to help. Often, I see one member of a couple jump past all the other steps and, at best, get to this one. At worst, they simply assume what will fix their partner’s negative emotion (read: make it go away) and try to do what they think will fix it. That is, they apologize and try to do something if possible to “make it right”. Unfortunately, the apology without the empathy first won’t feel sincere to most people, and the attempts to fix the emotion aren’t actually the things that will help the wife feel better. So, imagine this time that a male in a heterosexual couple brought dinner home to his wife and hurt her because she had other hopes and expectations. He does all the other steps listed above and then says, “Is there anything I can do to soothe the hurt you feel?” Doing this, he establishes humility by indicating that he doesn’t know what she needs, he communicates an intention to connect by not running away from her emotions, and he expresses a desire to work with her to help her feel better, not just to make the emotion go away.

Conclusion

When I guide couples therapy through the empathy skill as described above, they often feel more comfortable when conflicts arise. When using empathy, conflicts are understood through the lens of emotions, not just through the points of argument. This means that more creative solutions can be found and offered. Resolution of arguments is more effective because they don’t just find a technical compromise but establish an emotional connection while finding the compromise.

Relationship Empathy

I’m going to go into a deeper description about relationship empathy in a subsequent post, but for now, I’m going to identify that the keys to expressing empathy are (1) to demonstrate acceptance of the other person’s experience and emotions and (2) to demonstrate an emotional response that indicates a caring connection with the other person’s emotions.

Accept the person’s emotions

To demonstrate acceptance of another person’s experience, you first have to acknowledge the emotional state. Examples of acceptance, with increasingly direct emotional content, could include:

• “I see a reaction on your face, but I’m not sure what it means. Would you be willing to tell me?”
• “I hear you saying [or, “I can see. . . ”] that you are feeling sad”, or
• “I heard you say you are sad, but from what you told me, you might also be feeling rejected. Is that right?”

In the first example, you acknowledge that you don’t know what the emotional reaction you are seeing on the other person’s face, but you inquire further. The inquiry demonstrates a de facto acceptance that the emotion exists. In the second example, you repeat the feeling words shared by your partner or make a relatively simple observation to acknowledge sadness. The repetition demonstrates acceptance of the emotional experience. In the third example, you go beyond just the acknowledgement of the surface emotional content to identify and acknowledge nuance in the emotional experience. The nuance might even go beyond what the person has said. But the most important part of the third example is at the end. The question, “Is that right?” demonstrates that even if your attempt at understanding is incorrect, your goal is to learn. These sentences are all working towards acceptance.

However, keep in mind that acceptance and understanding are different. In acceptance, you only need to demonstrate that you believe that the emotion exists. For understanding, you need to be able to trace the internal process from the events to the person’s emotional experience. But in my experience, understanding, while helpful, isn’t necessary. You only need to believe that the other person has the emotional experience they are describing.

Demonstrate a connecting emotional response

The next step in empathy is to demonstrate that learning about the other person’s feelings generates a connecting emotional response. Sometimes when I’m working with people in couples therapy, the member of the couple trying to develop empathy will have a hard time shifting from the acceptance step to the emotional connection step. They might say something like, “I’m sorry you feel sad” while shaking their head, raising their eyebrows, curling their upper lip, and turning their face away from their partner. This kind of response describes an emotional reaction of contempt, but that’s not the kind of emotional response that creates a connection.

Here are some examples of connecting emotions when your partner tells you about a situation at work that made them angry. One reaction might be to share in the anger, “I can’t believe s/he did that to you. That’s very unprofessional behavior, and you have always had such a consistent work ethic.”  Another connecting reaction might be sadness, “After all that you have done for your team to have that team member treat you that way makes me sad. You’ve poured your heart out there.” A final example could be sharing confidence with your partner, “Even though that person treated you badly, that doesn’t have an impact on your skills. You are amazing at your job, and I have confidence that you can get through this.”

Which one is correct? I don’t know. Depending on the needs of the listener, each one of the responses that I used might work. The kind of response your partner needs is about their emotional make-up, and you will need to create an internal working model about which emotional responses work best for your partner in different situations.

Shared Vulnerability + Time = Emotional connection

A final advanced concept that I want to share about emotions is that emotional connections between people are built through shared vulnerability and time. The easiest way that I know of as a therapist to cultivate shared vulnerability in a couple is to encourage one person to reveal the vulnerable emotions underneath their communication. For example, I might help a client who is raising their voice towards their partner to shift to identifying the fears, hopes, and sadness behind the anger. However, another possibility would be for the partner who is being yelled at to be able to listen past the anger so skillfully that s/he could empathize with it, “It sounds like you might be scared, sad, and hopeless. Is that right?” in either case, though, on the other side of this vulnerability an emotional connection gets forged when the partners are able to spend time with each other in the vulnerable emotions.

I want to be clear, though, that emotional vulnerability doesn’t only come from spending time experiencing negative emotions. Positive emotions are bonding too. For example, one recipe for helping people bond emotionally is to help them face a challenge together (e.g., ubiquitous “team building” exercises at the company retreat). Sometimes, the vulnerability emerges in the context of an environmental challenge, and the emotions that are experienced are happy or joyful. In fact, when I listen to many couples talk about how they fell in love, they often share stories of engaging in new environments or activities together.

The second ingredient to create an emotional connection, I’m referring to as “time”. What I mean, though, is not just time allowing the vulnerability to continue or time being a couple. I’m referring to the repeated experience of this shared vulnerability. Once I help a couple experience shared vulnerability in session, I will encourage them to begin trying to create opportunities for it between sessions. For example, imagine that you’ve had a hard day at work and you come home. You remember that you’ve been encouraged by me as your therapist to try being vulnerable, yet launching directly into what happened at work feels too exposed. So, instead, you say to your partner, “I’ve been thinking about what Dr. Eric said about shared vulnerability, but it is hard sometimes to just launch into saying the vulnerable things. You know what I mean?” And without exposing too much detail, you’ve already shared your vulnerability about being vulnerable. Now the ball is in your partner’s court. Will they join you there? I hope so.

Conclusion

The last two posts have identified that emotions are created by our perceptions and the stories we tell ourselves. The emotions summarize our physical reactions to interpersonal events and signal to us whether our relationship needs are being met or whether we can anticipate that they will be met in the future. Since our emotional experience helps determine our behavior (and colors our next perceptions), it doesn’t matter if our emotions have logical causes. One way or another, in relationships, we primarily relate to the emotions we have. The best way to relate to emotions in others is with empathy, which includes both acceptance and connection. Over time, the mutual and repeated experience of shared emotional vulnerability and empathetic connection leads people to feel connected with one another. In my next post, I will share an empathy development tool that I use to help people and reflect a little bit on how I put that tool to use.

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In my last blog post, I presented 6 Essential Facts about emotions. These were intended to set the stage for this more advanced review of the role of emotions in relationships and how understanding emotions can help a relationship improve.

Emotions are created by our perceptions and interpretations

Most of our emotional reactions are significantly shaped by our experience of people in the past. A word that a parent used negatively might shape the way that word is heard when a lover uses that same word (even if the lover is using that word in a very different way). Similarly, if our unloving parent had a characteristic curl of a lip when angry, we may react very intensely to a lover who makes a similar lip-curl. This is true even if the lover’s lip curl means something entirely different.

Emotions are quick summaries, based on our experiences and our stories, that signal to us whether our emotional needs are or are not likely to be met (more on that later). The scolding word from the parent meant I would not receive praise. The curl of the lip meant I was not going to receive love. The emotion of pain or anger when we perceive these cues is a way of protecting us from the experiences that we have paired with the cue. The emotion comes with an action motivation (see previous post) that helps us to respond to what we expect will happen when we perceive that first cue. The challenge is that our partners probably aren’t using the same script that our parents were. Our bosses aren’t likely to be using the exact script that our elementary school teacher was using. Yet because our emotional experience to the stimulus is the same, we might be inclined to respond to these current relationships with the script we learned in those early relationships.

In fact, our perceptions so thoroughly incline us to actions out of those old scripts that we’re likely to think that our experience is real. We tell stories about ourselves and other people that help us make sense of our emotional experience and our responsive behaviors. For example, we might say, “You’re trying to control me!” or “It’s all my fault that you don’t love me.” As other people respond to these spoken or unspoken scripts, it is so easy for us to get into a very problematic dance. The other person denies our script, “No, I don’t want to control you”, or tries to defuse it, “I’m not saying it’s all your fault, I’m saying that I need something from you because I love you.” But ultimately, if the script is very reflexive and fixed, we will hear these rebuttals as confirmation of our original script.

The pattern is that early emotional experiences lead to perceptual inclinations and interpersonal scripts, which we then use to interpret our current interpersonal relationships, and once interpreted, we act out of our role in the script.

I have found that it is important to help clients learn two things. First, the message of the emotion, “Your needs aren’t getting met,” is true. That is, the emotion is valid. Second, the emotionally laden perception and stories may not be accurate. Once the client can learn that the emotional message is both true and not true in this way, they can usually begin to behave in a way more in line with their aspirations.

Emotions are physiological summaries

Let’s imagine that in a romantic relationship, physical affection like hugs and kisses is important for you. Now, if your partner forgets to hug and kiss you goodbye one morning, this experience might leave a sinking feeling in your stomach when you first notice it. You might also have a change in posture, like a downturned face, or a lower back that is slumped outward. In assessing your emotional experience, you might say that you are “disappointed”. The word “disappointed” isn’t written somewhere except as a summary of how your body feels in that moment.

I often use an analogy with my clients that our emotions are like gauges on a dashboard. The emotional summary tells us what is happening in other parts of the car. An important aspect of this analogy is that each person can only accurately see their own dashboard. This helps me eliminate conversations where one partner is telling the other that she or he “shouldn’t” feel that way. Since we each only see our own emotional dashboard, it doesn’t much matter whether we “should” be feeling some way; if the dial on the dashboard reads “disappointed,” then that’s the real experience, the real summary.

But what does “disappointed” mean? What is it saying about the person who is experiencing it? Or what is it saying about the partner? This gets really tricky because people are very quick to go from “I feel disappointed” to “You disappointed me”. Or from “I’m in pain” to “You hurt me”. But these are very different statements. That’s why it can be really important to recognize that emotions are physiological summaries and that the physiological experience is telling us whether our needs are being met or whether we anticipate that they will be met in the future. But they don’t tell us whether our partners are trying to meet our needs or whether they will in the future.

Emotions are valid, even if the reasons for the emotions are illogical

A common theme that I see among my couples is that they begin arguing about the content of the conflict. “You left me standing there for 45 minutes.” “No, I didn’t. You were only there for 15 minutes, because you told me to pick you up a half-hour later than you think you did”. This kind of arguing has no winner, is not productive, and doesn’t help the relationship.

So, in a therapy session, I will turn to the person who was upset about being left behind and ask, “How did you feel when your spouse wasn’t there to pick you up?” Feeling scared, lonely, or angry might be very common. The facts of the situation are irrelevant. The emotions are shaping the different perceptions of the facts, so it is the emotions that need to be dealt with in the interaction, or we end up attending only to symptoms and not to the problem.

While the first section of this post identifies that perceptions shape emotions, once emotions are present, they (and not the perception) must be attended to. It is the emotion that begins shaping the person’s behavior. Acknowledgement of the emotion, empathy for the experience of the emotion, connection to value the person underneath the experience, and a review to identify the causes of the emotion (both interpersonal and intrapersonal) are what allow for the resolution of the emotional experience.

Sometimes clients object here, “But the facts matter!” To a degree, I understand. The client who says this is having their own emotional reaction to being accused of something that they feel is untrue. So, again, I turn to the person who wants the facts to matter, “How do you feel when, despite your efforts to demonstrate love to your partner, they experience a different set of facts, and their emotional experience is pain?” Following this course, the same healing is available to both. The person who wants the “facts” acknowledged will feel better when they can talk through the hurt and pain they feel when, despite their love, their actions (sometimes through no fault of their own) have resulted in pain in their partner.

Another perspective on the validity of emotions can be found in my prior blog post, “Of Mountain and Mole Hills”.

Conclusion

In my next post, I’m going to add two more advanced emotional concepts and summarize how all of these advanced concepts connect into one view of the importance of emotions in relationships and couples therapy.